If developers are the superheroes of the software industry, then the lack of documentation is our kryptonite.
Kelsey hightower
It’s four AM and your pager goes off. Your company’s service has crashed and clients are panicking. You scramble through a half-familiar code base, searching for the root cause. The error messages in the unit tests are frustratingly unspecific, and the internal README consists of headings followed by repeating one-word paragraphs: [TODO].
Or maybe your service is performing great and getting better. As more clients sign on, they have questions. So many questions. Emails and support tickets flood in as your service scales, and you’re increasingly pulled away from development and into support.
Most of us have to learn the importance of documentation the hard way, by finding it missing when we need it the most.
Well-documented projects save time for both developers on the project and users of the software. Projects without adequate documentation suffer from poor developer productivity, project scalability, user adoption, and accessibility. In short: bad documentation kills projects.
We found that documentation quality predicts teams’ success at implementing technical practices. These practices in turn predict improvements to the system’s technical capabilities, such as observability, continuous testing, and deployment
automation
Docs for Developers demystifies the process of creating great developer documentation, following a team of software developers as they work to launch a new product. At each step along the way, you learn through examples, templates, and principles how to create, measure, and maintain documentation.
Learn how to create documentation that makes you and your users more productive
This book does for dev docs what The Phoenix Project does for DevOps – It makes your aspirations attainable.
Anne Gentle, author of Docs Like Code
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